Criticism, not all of it consistent, grew in scope after 1274. The orders were accused of being corrupt. Their ineffectual worldiness required the disendowment of their estates situated away from the frontlines. The orders should be amalgamated into one super-order to provide a well-funded, disciplined core for attempts to recover and defend the Holy Land. Some even argued that rule in a reconquered Holy Land should be vested in such a united order and its head, a Bellator Rex, recruited from one of the royal houses of the west. There was no consensus behind these ideas, the Master of the Temple, Jacques de Molay (1292–1314), for one arguing against union. Some critics appeared as enthusiastic for the idea of military orders as they were hostile to their practice. Others admired the model of an order-state pioneered by the Teutonic Knights. These ideas did not remain the preserve of theorists and lobbyists. In 1291, Nicholas IV instructed provincial church councils to consider the orders’ future. At least four (Arles, Canterbury, Lyons and Norwich) supported a merger, as did Charles II of Naples, son of Charles of Anjou and a claimant to the throne of Jerusalem.30 While between 1305 and 1307 the Masters of the Temple and Hospital added their own opinions, unsurprisingly supportive of their orders, the weight of advice 1290–1312 urged at least reform of the orders, if not union or a new order altogether.
The arrest, persecution, trials and final suppression of the Templars did not, therefore, come from nowhere.31 Beginning with the arrest of all Templars in France on Friday 13 October 1307 (allegedly the origin for the ill-omen of Friday 13th), punctuated by torture, confessions, recantations and burnings, the sordid process was driven by officials of the king of France, appeased by the papal Curia and the other monarchs of western Europe. The attack culminated in the order’s suppression by Clement V at the Council of Vienne in 1312 and the final, brusque execution by burning of the last Master in Paris in 1314. The assault on the Templars became notorious for the luridness of the accusations against them, the barbarism of the use of torture by French inquisitors, the inconsistent leadership of Clement V, the confused defence mounted by the order and the single-minded ruthlessness of Philip IV of France and his ministers, especially Guillaume de Plaisians and Guillaume de Nogaret. The ambitious but sporadically spendthrift Philip IV may have wanted control of Templar propertied wealth. He may also genuinely have believed them to have failed in their holy mission, to which he possibly held a sincere attachment.32
If so, he was by no means alone. Pious conviction, self-righteous brutality and myopic moral certainty are familiar partners. There existed sufficient belief in the justice of their cause among the French persecutors and the watching secular and ecclesiastical elites of western Christendom to sustain a campaign of oppression that reeked of hypocrisy, mendacity and avarice as well as cruelty. The charges of blasphemy, sodomy, irregular and obscene ceremonies, the common currency of formal ecclesiastical abuse, were lent added plausibility by the perception of dereliction of duty. The low grade of Templar membership, comprising a worryingly high number of dim, often elderly and politically inadequate minor nobility, did not enhance their defence or inspire confidence in the order’s long-term value or viability. The garbled accounts of peculiar, half-remembered admission rituals may indicate some strange practices, not uncommon in closed, secretive elite male societies. Yet the confessions to the substantive charges appear mainly to have been extracted under torture, the trauma of public humiliation and sudden loss of liberty or the threat of violence. When led to the stake by his persecutors in 1314, the unfortunate Jacques de Molay insisted on his and his order’s innocence of all charges, a protestation in extremis from an unsubtle man of apparent sincere faith that perhaps should command credence. Clement V refused to bow to French pressure to condemn the order, merely citing its irredeemable loss of reputation as the cause for its suppression in 1312 without a verdict of guilt or innocence. Clement even wrong-footed the French persecutors by granting the confiscated Templar property to the Hospitallers.
The Templar scandal exerted a significant influence on the future direction of the two largest surviving military orders. The Teutonic Knights narrowly avoided the similar, perhaps better-merited, fate of dissolution after another inquiry begun by Clement V in 1308. Fresh from having only just escaped condemnation by Boniface VIII, the order at Riga was briefly excommunicated in 1312–13. Hard lobbying and the order’s role in Prussia and German imperial politics saved them, rather than any marked change in public or private behaviour, which continued to attract hostile comment, including a critical papal verdict in 1324 over the Livonian affair, before resurfacing prominently at the Council of Constance (1414–18).33 The Hospitallers too were not immune to external scrutiny, some of it highly critical, at times menacing, as when Pope Innocent VI threatened to impose reform from without.34
Both orders learnt from the Templar debacle that protection lay in physical security. After 1291, the Hospitallers, like the Templars, had been based in Cyprus; the Teutonic Knights in Venice. Between 1306 and 1310, the Hospitallers conquered the island of Rhodes, transferring their headquarters there in 1309. The same year, the Master of the Teutonic Knights moved to the distant safety of Marienburg (Marlbork) in Prussia. Both orders were now settled in their own order-states. The timing was hardly accidental, precisely coinciding with the trials of the Templars. From these moves the orders gained protection and a restatement of their vocations as warriors of Christ on the frontiers of Christendom. Whatever the compromises with supposed enemies across the religious frontier – and there were many – the relocation of the military orders altered their role. The Teutonic Knights effectively abandoned the eastern Mediterranean while the Hospitallers created an independent eastern Mediterranean principality. Although still supported by estates across all of Europe – Rhodes receiving its western profits in the form of annual ‘responsions’ – both orders now operated behind their own palisades as sovereigns, at no one’s beck and call except their own. By doing so, they helped shape the later medieval pattern of devolved and local campaigns in the east, which replaced the grand international expeditions of earlier generations in tackling the great new crusading venture of the later middle ages.
THE OTTOMAN TURKS
One of about ten emirates arising from the debris of the collapsed Seljuk sultanate of Rum in the later thirteenth century, the Ottomans fed on the carcass of the Byzantine empire.35 While their rivals to the south engaged in piracy in the Aegean, attracting naval leagues under papal auspices in 1332–4 and 1343–5, leading to the capture and occupation of Smyrna (1344–1405) and a futile campaign by Humbert, dauphin of Vienne (1345–6), the Ottomans posed a different problem. Originating in the area around Bursa in north-west Asia Minor, the Ottomans, followers of Osman and his son Orkhan (1326–62), began to annexe lands along the Sea of Marmora, reaching the Bosporus and Dardenelles by the 1330s. While other Turkish mercenaries were defending Smyrna from the Christian Holy League, in 1345 Orkhan was hired by a claimant to the Byzantine throne, John VI Cantacuzene, to fight in Thrace during the imperial civil war, first against rival Greeks then against invading Serbs. The Ottomans soon secured their own bases in the Gallipoli peninsula, Gallipoli itself falling in 1354. An Ottoman empire was being created in Europe, not Asia, on land, not around easily accessible coasts.
Alarm at Ottoman advances in Thrace led to the first crusading coalitions to stop them. An offshoot of the crusade plans of Urban V and Peter I of Cyprus, a small expedition commanded by Count Amadeus VI of Savoy in 1366–7 succeeded in capturing Gallipoli and a number of Black Sea ports.36 This hardly gave the Ottomans pause. Around 1369, they took Adrianople (Erdine), which became their capital. By the end of the century, after their defeat of Serbia at Kossovo in 1389, they dominated the Balkans between the Danube and Gulf of Corinth. While the spirited but ill-conducted crusade that was crushed at Nicopolis on the Danube in 1396 served only to consolidate Ottoman power, their defeat by Timur in 1402 spared central Europe immediate further assault. Under Murad II pressure was resu
med. Gradually, assisted by confessional and political bickering among their Christian opponents, the Ottomans conquered the whole of the Balkans, as well as Asia Minor and Anatolia. The capture of the long-isolated Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed II the Conqueror led to the absorption of the rest of Latin and Byzantine Greece by the mid-1460s and Venetian Negroponte in 1470. After a generation of relative peace after Mehmed’s death, Selim I the Grim and Suleiman I the Magnificent conquered Mamluk Syria, Palestine and Egypt (1516–17), Belgrade (1521), Rhodes (1522–3) and most of Hungary after the crushing victory at Mohacs (1526). Vienna was besieged, but not taken, in 1529. This transformation of the political map of eastern Europe and the Mediterranean was conducted on the ideological terrain of the wars of the cross. Yet, the improbably successful defence of Belgrade in 1456 aside, no crusade had done much to prevent it.
Remarkably, compared with the number of sermons preached, taxes levied and indulgences sold, active crusading against the Turks remained a sideshow. Even at the height of the Ottoman threat to central Europe, when in 1463 Pius II was pointing to their presence ‘from the Black Sea to Hungary, from the Aegean shore to the Danube’, planners felt the need to associate their grander schemes of resistance with the pipe-dream of the recovery of the Holy Land.37 Yet this was no distant war that relied on dedicated rhetorical fictions and religious empathy to render it immediate, as was the case with the Holy Land. The Greek émigré Cardinal John Bessarion argued, in 1463, that the Ottomans threatened ‘our country, our homes, our children, our family, and our wives’ as they wished ‘to subjugate the entire world starting with Italy’.38 Four years earlier, a papal legate told Henry VI of England that Ottoman dominance of the Danube threatened the Rhine and hence English interests directly. The later fifteenth-century English House of Commons feared lest the Ottoman conquests interrupt the supply of bowstaves from the Crimea.39 Scare-mongering of Italy in danger did not appear fanciful when Otranto was briefly occupied in 1480. The chances of a Turkish conquest of Rome, of Italian Renaissance artists serving an Ottoman sultan were not entirely remote. As a barometer of their success, the demonized Turk replaced the Saracen as a western European catch-all bogeyman.
Yet this perception of the Ottomans as constituting a danger to the traditional integrity of Latin Christendom took generations to become established in the imagination and policies of the west, never fully eradicating the luminous image of the lost Holy Land as a metaphor of Christian failure. There were several reasons for this. The initial victims of Ottoman conquest were as liable to be schismatic Greeks as Catholics. The tangled politics of Byzantium, Latin Greece and the Christian Balkans lacked the resonance of the recovery of the Holy Land, which was sustained by a widespread liturgy of supplication, intercession and sacrament. Only in the fifteenth century did the Turk even compete for the prayers of the faithful.40 Confusion and wishful thinking, often attendant on crusading, were rife. When Urban V authorized his new crusade in the east in 1363, he made no distinction between the Mamluks and the Turks.41.
Conceptual obstacles paled beside practical difficulties. The early strategy (c.1332–67) of small naval leagues or modest amphibious attacks on the littoral of Greece and Asia Minor hardly matched the military resources of the Ottomans as they advanced into the Balkans. The Ottomans’ was a land empire, not a thalassocracy. A further debilitating problem lay in the implacable enmity between potentially the most important providers of transport, the Genoese and the Venetians, the former as often as not actively allying with the Turks to steal material advantage over their ancient commercial rivals whose empire the Ottomans were eroding. The alternative, a mass land attack by western powers in conjunction with local rulers, never materialized, except in very attenuated forms in 1396, 1444 and 1456. Even the growing acceptance of a land route for a new crusade, while recognizing the plight of eastern Europe, was often justified in terms of Godfrey of Bouillon, not Mehmed the Conqueror.
THE TURKS AND BYZANTIUM
The nature of the Ottoman threat distinguished them from previous Asiatic opponents of Byzantium.42 By 1300, the Ottomans had lost or adapted their steppe-based nomadic culture, which had first brought them to Asia Minor. Long before the establishment of their capital at Adrianople (Erdine), their political system revolved around a settled polity, no longer reliant on pasturage and a nomadic lifestyle. Being an Ottoman depended on loyalty to the ruling dynasty not ethnic origin or identity: Ottoman, follower of Osman/Uthman, the eponymous, semilegendary founder of the dynasty’s greatness. As with Christian political communities, religious observance supplied the signifying social and propagandist glue. In this, the Ottomans copied the Byzantines. Just as Latins and Turks and other barbarians had perennially become Byzantine before 1204, so Greeks became Ottomans, including, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, members of the imperial family itself and their courtiers. Although insistent on Islam, the Ottomans were not fighting religious wars, even if they relied on traditional jihad rhetoric. Their early proximity to the Byzantine frontier probably encouraged this, an inscription in their first capital Bursa describing Sultan Orkhan as a ‘mujahid, sultan of the ghazis (i.e. holy warriors), ghazi son of ghazi’, a useful recruiting and disciplining ploy.43 However, Ottoman policy was essentially secular: dynastic aggrandizement, wealth, power, domination, not conversion. They allied with peoples regardless of religion. They tolerated the faiths of their subjects provided they remained loyal. Ottoman success was a product of cultural similarity and contact with their neighbours and adversaries. The great fifteenth-century Albanian resistance leader and Christian hero Scanderbeg (d. 1468) had begun his career as an Ottoman hostage, becoming a Muslim in the service of Murad II, who gave him his name – Alexander Bey. He converted to Roman Catholicism to ease an alliance with the rulers of Naples across the Adriatic.44 Western travellers who stayed at the Ottoman court, such as the Burgundian spy Bertrandon de la Broquière in the 1420s, did not depict them as barbarians. The French crusader Marshal Boucicaut, a veteran of Nicopolis, defender of Constantinople in 1399 and attacker of the Syrian coast in 1403, once offered to serve under Bayezid I (1389–1403).45 While in the 1460s, Pius II and his agents were content to fall back on tired if lurid hyperbole of barbarism, the Turks as ‘savage beasts in human form’, Cardinal Bessarion recognized the rational secular imperative behind Ottoman policies: ‘He invades foreign lands so as not to lose his own.’46 The Ottoman conquest of Byzantium hardly fits a scheme of an immemorial clash of cultures or religion, Gibbon’s ‘World’s Debate’.
The history of Asia Minor and the Balkans in the later middle ages cannot be explained in confessional terms. The rhetoric of religious confrontation imposed (and imposes) a pattern on events favoured by contemporary apologists, diplomats and polemicists that hardly corresponded to experience. Despite the individual and collective human tragedies inevitable in military conflict and conquest, the Ottoman advances did not constitute unalloyed disaster. Late medieval Byzantium had failed to bring order, peace and civility to the region once under its sway, a failure reaching back beyond 1204 into the twelfth century. The Ottomans restored the geographic, political and economic coherence of the old Greek empire. The Turks entered Europe as vassals and allies of the Byzantine emperor. The Ottoman empire as such, as opposed to the Ottoman dynasty, began in Europe, not Asia. Rival Greek imperial dynasties in the fourteenth century married into the Ottoman sultan’s family. Serb Christian cavalry fought for the Turks at Nicopolis in 1396 (against crusaders) and at Ankara in 1402. Genoese helped Murad II defeat a dangerous western crusade in 1444. Christian allies fought with the Turks at the final storming of Constantinople in 1453, an event actually welcomed by some disaffected Greek Orthodox divines. Holy war remained largely a western luxury that Greeks and other inhabitants of the Balkans could ill afford. In the region of Thessalonica, the people’s preferences expressed this complexity. Conquered by the Turks in the 1380s, the region was restored to Byzantine control in 1403. Under the Ottomans, direct taxation i
ncreased (via the kharaj or poll tax on non-Muslim ‘People of the Book’, Christians and Jews) but the rents paid by peasants to landlords decreased, lightening the net fiscal burden. After 1403, the Greeks maintained the Ottoman tax regime, two-thirds of proceeds going to the monks of Mt Athos, who, in 1384, had advocated support for the Muslim Turks against what they regarded as a heretical Greek emperor (John V Palaeologus).47 Such cross-currents were typical.
The crusade against the Turks consequently failed to correspond with the political context or military requirements of the Ottoman advance. Western efforts fell into two general phases. The first, interrupted by the collapse of Ottoman power after their defeat by Timur the Lame in 1402, concerned the defence of Byzantium, a task that had failed utterly by the 1460s. The second, consequent on the first, lay in the defence of Latin Christian territories in eastern and central Europe. At the heart of the muddled western response to the Turk lay a reluctance to abandon the conceptual reassurance of Holy Land polemic even in the face of detailed advice and evidence of how Ottoman power worked from spies and veterans of Turkish wars. The traditional Manichaean designation of ‘Christian’ and ‘infidel’ wholly failed to encompass the reality of the politics of the Ottoman advance, let alone its military dimension. The old view of a Turkish conquest of the Byzantine Christian bastion weakened by Latin indifference or hatred of Greeks, of a Muslim enslavement of a resentful Christian peoples, does not match events. Unlike the wars to defend the Holy Land, here the compromises of political realities contradicted the imperatives of religious idealism.
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